Look Inside: Surrealist Art | He Toi Pohewa

from museum boijmans van beuningen

MASTERPIECES This comprehensive book showcases all the works from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam that appear in the major Surrealism exhibition hosted by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in 2021.

Surrealism emerged in Paris in the early 1920s, at first mainly through literature and poetry and later through drawing, painting, photography, performance, exhibitions and game-playing.

Developed by artists and writers from across Europe, Surrealist ideas were radical — the Surrealists wanted to launch a revolution of the mind that would lead to profound social and political change.

EWA H O P I HE TO

LIZZIE BISLEY ELS HOEK

CONTENTS 2 TPP010 Te Papa 190x250 Surrealism Cat 210pp_S7D.indd 2

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Forewords Practical Dreamers: An Introduction to Surrealism Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: Building a Surrealism Collection

4 8

30

1 THE SURREALIST REVOLUTION 2 DADA AND SURREALISM 3 THE DREAMING MIND 4 CHANCE AND THE IRRATIONAL 5 DESIRE 6 STRANGELY FAMILIAR BIOGRAPHIES FURTHER READING ABOUT THE AUTHORS IMAGE CREDITS

38 50 74 100 132 162

196 203 204 205

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N O I M T S C I L U A D E N O A TR RR IN SU TO

FIG. 1 Salvador Dalí dressed in his diving suit, The International Exhibition of Surrealist Art, London, 1936

AL TIC S R AC E PR AM E DR

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“ … at the time when [Surrealism] broke over its founders as an inspiring dream wave, it seemed the most integral, conclusive, absolute of movements. Everything with which it came into contact was integrated.

Life only seemed worth living where the threshold between waking and sleeping was worn away in everyone …”

WALTER BENJAMIN, 19291

In June 1936, paintings, drawings, a print and a jacket by the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí were included in The International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s Burlington Galleries. This was the first Surrealist exhibition to be held in Britain and it brought together work by many leading European artists, alongside examples of a small and emerging strand of British Surrealism. The exhibition attracted huge crowds, with more than 40,000 visitors streaming in to see it over a threeweek run. A catalogue was produced, and the French writer André Breton published a short volume titled What is Surrealism? that aimed to introduce a mass British audience to the Surrealist worldview.2 As part of the public programme for the show, Dalí was invited to give a lecture in the gallery. He chose to do this in a diving suit with fitted helmet, the suit having been hired by his friend Lord Berners. When asked

1 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The last snapshot of the European intelligentsia’ (1929), trans. Edmond Jephcott, New Left Review 108 (1 March 1978), p. 48.

2 André Breton, What is Surrealism?, trans. David Gascoyne (London: Faber and Faber, 1936).

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in the hire shop how deep the dive would be, Berners replied that Mr Dalí ‘was going to descend to the subconscious’ (fig. 1).3 Dalí walked into the room in heavy lead diving shoes, held up by two assistants. Reaching the podium, he began to feel suffocated but could not open the helmet. In the end he had to be dramatically rescued by his patron Edward James and wife Gala, who broke him out of the helmet using hammer blows to release its bolts. Dalí later wrote: ‘The audience for the most part was convinced that all this was part of the show, and was loudly applauding, extremely amused at the pantomime that we were playing so realistically.’4 Salvador Dalí has an important place in the history of Surrealism, in part because, as the story of the diving suit so vividly suggests, he was quick to become its most widely popular figure. Recognised around the world for the shape of his moustache, and for the disturbing, hyper-real imagery used in his paintings, Dalí has become a stand-in for many of Surrealism’s most extravagant public gestures.

Beyond this public persona, however, Salvador Dalí also demonstrates the extreme versatility, breadth and diversity of Surrealist practice.

Although best known for his paintings, Dalí also made films, sculptures, drawings, prints and illustrations. He designed domestic interiors and collaborated with the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli on textiles and fashion. He created a dream sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound and designed Surrealist furniture. Dalí wrote prolifically throughout his life and lived, in many ways, through a performative Surrealism.

Born in the Spanish province of Catalonia in 1904, Salvador Dalí grew up in a middle-class family. He was fascinated by art from a young age and spent much of his childhood poring over reproductions of historic paintings. Dalí began to work seriously as a painter when he was a teenager, spending summers in a studio that his parents rented for him in the seaside town of Cadaqués. In 1929, after studying art in Madrid, Dalí visited Paris, where fellow Catalan artist Joan Miró introduced him to the French Surrealists.

Dalí had come to Paris for the release of the short Surrealist film An Andalusian Dog (Un chien Andalou), on which he had collaborated with his friend Luis Buñuel. He was quickly welcomed into the Surrealist group. André Breton, one of the founders of Surrealism, wrote after seeing Dalí’s first Paris exhibition: ‘With the coming of Dalí, it is perhaps the first time that the mental windows have been opened really wide.’5 Arriving in Paris to find Surrealism already in full swing, Salvador Dalí provided a breath of fresh and disruptive air. He immediately proposed a new means of producing Surrealist paintings, and in the early 1930s he was fundamental in initiating Surrealist experiments with objects and sculpture. Dalí breathed new life into the Surrealist group at a moment when it was looking for different kinds of provocation.

Dalí is the perfect entry point to a history of Surrealism as he traverses both its radical, theoretical side, and its most popular, theatrical aspects. He demonstrates the difficulties of defining and delimiting Surrealism, encapsulating the fundamental idea that ‘Surrealism is a point of view, and as such applies to painting, literature, play, behaviour, politics, architecture, photography, and cinema’.6

3 Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) (New York: Dover, 2013), pp. 344–45.

4 Ibid., p. 345.

5 André Breton, ‘The First Dalí Exhibition’ (1929), in Franklin Rosemont (ed.), André Breton: What is Surrealism? Selected Writings (New York: Pathfinder, 1978), p. 45.

6 Julien Levy, Surrealism (New York: The Black Sun Press, 1936), p. 3.

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FIG. 2 Hugo Ball reciting the poem ‘Karawane’ at the Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, 1916

Surrealism emerged in Paris in the early 1920s, at first mainly through poetry and other literature. Drawing together a group of artists and writers from around Europe, Surrealist ideas were formally launched in 1924 with the publication of a manifesto by André Breton (cat. 001). Here Breton offered an explicit definition of the term ‘surrealism’, which he described as: Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which we propose to express — either verbally, through writing, or in any other manner — the true functioning of thought … in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and outside of any aesthetic or moral concerns.7 Through this model of ‘psychic automatism’, Breton imagined Surrealism as the means of expressing an unconscious inner self. The 1924 manifesto drew on ideas of madness, the marvellous, the dreamlike and the irrational. By focusing on bodies of thought and experience that were rejected by conventional society, Breton presented Surrealism as the pathway to another, different (and more expansive) reality. The Surrealists aimed to access ‘the true functioning of thought’ by tapping into the unconscious mind — thereby escaping the restrictive confines of reason, aesthetics, and social or moral codes.

From this definition, it is possible to see the radical and vast scope of the Surrealist worldview. Surrealism was not an art movement in the conventional sense of the term, and it cannot be defined in relation to art historical style or form.

Instead, it represented — and still represents — a way of thinking about the world.

7 André Breton, Manifeste du surréalisme (1924), in Marguerite Bonnet et al. (eds), André Breton. Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), p. 328.

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2

DADA AND SURREALISM

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Surrealism was closely linked to the earlier Dada movement. Dada started in Switzerland in 1916, at the height of the First World War. Dada writers and artists were outraged by the horrors of the war, and by the corrupt nationalism that they saw as having caused it. In reaction to the pointlessness of this conflict they turned their backs on order and logic, revelling instead in the irrational and the nonsensical.

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Working collectively, and often with a large dose of black humour, Dadaists produced performance, poetry, manifestos, collage, sculpture, newspapers and magazines. They used everyday and found materials, loudly rejecting their society’s expectations of the kinds of objects that could count as art.

Through their work, the Dadaists sought to disrupt any sense of ‘normal’ life, breaking social conventions and looking to shock and confuse their audiences.

The Dada movement spread quickly throughout Europe but began to decline in the early 1920s. Many important Dadaists became involved with Surrealism, and Dada’s anarchic ideas and practices lived on, in a different way, through that movement. Together, Dada and Surrealism offered one of the most significant cultural revolts of the twentieth century — one whose influence continues to be felt today.

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008 MAN RAY Gift (Cadeau) 1921 (1974) Cast iron and copper nails 16.5 × 10 × 10 cm BEK 1685 (MK) In December 1921 the American artist Man Ray exhibited this work in the Paris bookshop Librairie Six. On the afternoon of the exhibition opening, he disappeared to a bar with the composer Erik Satie. A number of whiskies stimulated his imagination, and he bought the materials for this sculpture on the way back to the gallery. Ray glued a row of tacks to an iron, titled it Gift, and added it to the exhibition.

The sculpture anticipated later Surrealist objects — especially in its erotic suggestion of ripping clothes, rather than ironing out creases.

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024 MAX ERNST The Couple (Le couple) 1923 Oil on canvas 106.5 × 142 cm 2708 (MK) Shortly after a group of French Dadaists visited the artist Max Ernst in Cologne in 1921, he moved to Paris, leaving his wife and their young son behind. An intense relationship began with the Dada writer Paul Éluard and his wife Gala (who later married Salvador Dalí). Ernst lived with the Éluards, decorated their house and painted The Couple, which probably depicts his hosts. Ernst had participated in early experiments with hypnosis.

In one session, Paul Éluard was associated with the colour sky blue, which may be why Ernst chose to use this blue for the male figure.

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026 MARCEL DUCHAMP Rotoreliefs 1935 Offset printing on cardboard and greaseproof paper, plastic and cellophane Discs: 20 cm diameter Holder: 24.9 cm diameter MB 1991/4 a-k (MK) Wanting to move away from ‘retinal art’ towards art for the mind, Marcel Duchamp became interested in optical illusion. In his film Anémic Cinéma (1926) he created hallucinatory visual and linguistic effects by alternating spinning discs printed with spiral patterns and discs printed with anagrammatic wordplays.

In 1935 he had 500 copies of the Rotoreliefs made.

Each set contained six cardboard discs with spiral patterns on both sides.

They were meant to be spun on a gramophone turntable, creating mind-altering illusions of depth.

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SURREALIST ART | HE TOI POHEWA Edited by Els Hoek and Lizzie Bisley RRP: $35.00 ISBN: 978-0-9951338-5-3 PUBLISHED: June 2021 PAGE EXTENT: 208 pages FORMAT: Limpbound SIZE: 250 x 190 mm

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO ORDER https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/te-papa-press/art-books/surrealist-art